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FROM THE OBSERVATORY · 27-Sep-2017

Faint Spiral Galaxy IC5332

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Faint Spiral Galaxy IC5332
IC 5332 is a very faint spiral galaxy 39 million light years away. It is a challenging target in light polluted skies. While processing the image I noticed several small galaxies around and in the background of its spiral arms. I'm interested in revisiting this target again with a longer focal length to see what detail I can tease from these.
BEHIND THE IMAGE

Notes from the session

Image:
52x 600s Luminance bin2x2
13x 600s Red bin2x2
16x 600s Green bin2x2
14x 600s Blue bin2x2


Total exposure 16 hours 50 minutes.

Hardware:
Skywatcher Black Diamond ED120
SkyWatcher EQ8 Pro Mount
QSI 683-ws8 Camera @ -15°C
Astronomik Typ2 LRGB filters
Starlight Xpress Lodestar X2 Autoguider
Innovations Foresight On Axis Guider
Starlight Instruments Focus Boss II



Location:
Orange zone in Brisbane, Australia. (Bortle 7)
Imaged over 4 nights, new moon.



Software:
Planning & camera alignment with Aladin 9
Captured with AstroArt 6
Guiding with PHD2 + PHD_Dither
FocusLock live focusing
CCDInspector: Image analysis & rejection
CCDStack 2+: Calibrate, align, stack, deconvolution, remove gradients, combine RGB.
Photoshop CC: Shadows/highlights, noise reduction, high pass filter, combine L+RGB, curves, adjust colour balance, saturation, crop.